A Conversation with Arena Football League Commissioner Randall Boe
Harrison Brown
Friday April 26, 2019
When Randall Boe became the Arena Football Leagues commissioner prior to the 2018 season there were only four teams in the league and the very future of the AFL was in doubt. However just over a year into the job Boe has made significant progress to restoring the league with two new franchises and a significantly altered business model that focuses on the league owning teams itself. While the work is hardly finished the AFL has proven that the league is in a stable place with potential for more growth over the coming years.
“One of the important things we’ve done here is restructure the corporate operations and the league operations,” Boe said. “The league will own all six of the teams and we will operate the teams going forward and one of the things that does is enable us to ensure that there’s parity in the league, everyone’s got the same kind of resources there’s no New York Yankees in the Arena Football League.”
“The quality of ownership groups was kind of spotty, but this solves that because we can put a consistent product and make sure that it’s up to our standards and one of the interesting things is it allows us to take a very different approach to expansion. In the past someone in City X would come and say, “hey I’m interested in owning an arena football league team,” and we would end up putting a team in their city. Sometimes that worked out great and sometimes it didn’t and what we’re doing now is we’ve been doing data driven assessments of tons of cities and coming up with the factors that we think are important, we’ve been doing some pretty sophisticated data analysis and progression analysis to come up with a list of cities that we think will be great markets for Arena Football,” Boe said.
The shift in the way the league will approach expansion puts the power into the AFL’s hands when deciding who will enter the league. This season Boe and company decided to add two new cities with Columbus Ohio and Atlantic City New Jersey joining the AFL this winter. Columbus will play at Nationwide Arena a high-class arena that the NHL’s Columbus Blue Jackets use, and Atlantic City will play in historic Boardwalk Hall on the boardwalk of AC.
“The difference from the old days is that we don’t need to go find an ownership group in that city, we’re going to come up with a list of five or six of our top preferences and then we’ll go out to those cities and start talking about looking at the venue and let's look in depth at the city and demographics and all sorts of stuff like that so we’ll be choosing the best markets for arena football as opposed to having it be markets where someone wants to own a team,” Boe said.
“Columbus has been fantastic since we announced the team the support we’ve gotten in the community has been just fantastic and really exciting. It has exceeded our expectations and I think we’re going to have a really great season there in Columbus, the first home game is May 18th so I will definitely be there for that,” Boe said.
The new model for the AFL’s expansion hasn’t been the only change as the league has also put an emphasis on the future of legalized sports betting across the country. With New Jersey already legalizing sports betting Atlantic City became the ideal spot to be the market most symbolic to betting.
“One of the things we think is going to be really important for the growth of the AFL is legalized sports betting and we think Arena Football is tailor made for sports betting. There is so much action and scoring it lends itself really well to that and people enjoy doing it, when you’ve got bets on the game boy do you pay attention. Legalized sports betting is a really important powerful tool for fan engagement, and we’re excited about that,” Boe said.
“It made a ton of sense for us to put a team in Atlantic City to cement those relationships to kind of put ourselves in a market where we could really focus on pushing out our relationship with the sports betting world. The challenge there is going to be drawing people who are tourists in addition to residents in Atlantic City, so it’s a little bit different than marketing a team in Columbus,” Boe said.
The addition of Atlantic City alone wouldn’t be enough to spark a rush of betting on arena football league games but partnering with one of the top daily fantasy apps in the world has opened many doors for placing bets on arena football. This week the AFL and DraftKings formally displayed their daily fantasy options for this season and fans have already began setting their lineups for this weekend’s games.
“We struck a deal with them last year and they were a sponsor of the league and we played with four teams, so it didn’t really make sense for them to launch a fantasy product, so we didn’t. Once we expanded to six teams that made it viable and what they’ve put together is fantastic. I think even though it’s only been a couple of days since it’s been announced they’re very pleased with the reaction and we of course are really excited to be working with them we think they’re fantastic,” Boe said.
“We’re going to be making an announcement this afternoon and I’m really excited about this we’re going to announce the launch of a free game with a company called Chalkline Sports. What it’s going to look like is if you’re familiar with some of the sports book apps it’s going to look like that, there are going to be bets on our games but this is free to play so there not actual bets but it will look like you’re betting on the game,” Boe said.
“It’s free to play so you can go in there and the game will have contests and prizes but obviously it won't be actual betting, but it’ll give you the actual look and feel of sports betting. I think that’s going to be really interesting and fun and I think that as sports betting becomes legal in more and more states a lot of people are familiar generally but they’ve never actually done it so I think learning a little about how it works, what it means when it says Baltimore -130, people don’t necessarily know what that means so we think it’ll be an exciting and fun thing for the fans and we think it’ll help educate them on sports betting and we think it’s great for the league,” Boe said.
Boe joined the AFL as a member of Monumental Sports in the spring of 2016 when the company purchased the Washington Valor and a few months later the Baltimore Brigade. However, his first job in football was a much different one back home in his home state of Iowa.
“I grew up in Iowa City Iowa and I played all sports, basketball, baseball, football, and even kickball. I was and still am an avid Iowa Hawkeyes fan, and we lived not too far from Kinnick stadium and my brother and I used to park the cars on football Saturdays and take the proceeds from that. We could fit eleven cars on our yard so that was eleven dollars, we’d split it and I’d get six because I was the older brother and he got five. We would often go down to the stadium and there were a lot of tickets available back then for like a dollar,” Boe said.
“I was always a big Iowa football and basketball fan, my first professional game was probably a Cubs game at Wrigley Field in the 1970’s. Wrigley Field is an amazing place and I remain a diehard Cubs fan,” Boe said.
Parking fellow Hawkeyes’ fans cars on his lawn wound up just being a side hustle before Boe went to college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and then attended Ivy League law school at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. How would Boe describe the Ivy’s Law department? Straight and to the point he gave a one-word response, “hard.” “I think in general being a law student is hard work, but I loved living in Philadelphia and I still do. I’m very excited that we’ve got the AFL headquarters situated here in Philadelphia,” Boe said.
After graduating from Penn Boe went to work in Washington D.C. at a law firm before going on to work at American Online also known as AOL. Boe was involved in the early days of the online company and was an influential part in the company success.
“I went there when it was at an office park behind a Cadillac dealership in Tysons Corner Virginia, it was growing pretty fast and it was already publicly traded but it was very much a startup. What I learned was how you work in an environment where things are changing so incredibly rapidly, and I learned the value of ideas. Ultimately it was really good ideas that drove the creation of value at AOL,” Boe said.
“Everyone has a version of the AOL story in their head, and I’ve read all the books and none of them really quite get it. I think AOL was a company that was way ahead of its time and you look at some of the things that we came up with and built, we invented instant messaging. For every text message that's sent someone should be ringing a little bell saying thank you AOL,” Boe said.
“I took a lot from my time at AOL, and that’s where I got to know Ted Leonsis. We both left AOL around the same time and Ted asked if I would come with him because he owned the Washington Capitals and had a minority interest in the Wizards and what is now the Capital One Arena. He asked if I would come and help him get ready to buy the basketball team and the arena so that’s what I did, I put that together and that's what became Monumental Sports and Entertainment which is now one of the largest sports entertainment companies,” Boe said.
Ted Leonsis and Boe building a relationship at AOL and the trust that Leonsis had in Boe to be such an important piece in the creation of Monumental Sports shows the faith he has in the AFL’s commissioner. With the revitalization of the arena football league being Leonsis current task at hand he put someone at the top that has an incredible background and his trust like Boe has.
“When you look around there aren’t many companies that own the collection of teams and assets that Monumental Sports owns, there are only a handful of those in the world. Monumental Sports has been in the forefront of innovation and creativity for a long time too and I think that goes back to the experience that we all shared at AOL,” Boe said.
“The other thing that goes back to AOL is the idea that sports at some level is another form of entertainment content. In the rest of the entertainment and media world you build a platform and distribute your content and that is a really important function and I think for a long time in sports the focus was more on our job is to go out there and play the game and sell the tickets and the sponsorships and the concessions and they’re obviously right that’s critical but in a larger sense it is really unique and valuable entertainment content and so working to maximize the value of that content and the way it’s distributed is really important,” Boe said.
Monumental Sports has shifted a lot of their attention and energy to the AFL since joining in 2016. Leonsis and company have gone from being one of what was initially thought to be many NBA and NHL owners to the key component of the league. But in the end, it may be a positive to have a company that has a proven track record like Monumental to run the show instead of the previous attempts at running the league.
“The league has been around for more than thirty years it’s the second oldest professional football league in America, the oldest being the NFL. We know that the game is something that fans love and we’re all about improving the game wherever we can. The thing that has happened to the league over the years is that there weren’t always strong ownership groups and the leagues finances weren’t always in great shape. The league was also hit very hard by the financial crisis in 2008-2009,” Boe said.
“To me it was never a problem with the game it was the business model and I think our priority has been let’s make the game as great as we can make it so we changed a bunch of rules so we could speed the game up a little bit and I think that’s important. We always look to enhance player safety so we think about that but we want to make the game as great as we can but I think we have worked very hard to come up with a business model that works, that’s sustainable and is going to allow us to expand steadily and sustainably over the next few years,” Boe said.
“One of the things I realized pretty quickly is that the most important thing we have going for us is our players. Putting aside how tough they are they’re ambassadors of the game and when they’re out there interacting with the fans there is nothing like that in sports. I am always so impressed meeting our players because they’re guys who love football and they love Arena Football. They make a lot of sacrifices to be able to play arena football and I am always very proud of our players,” Boe said.
The AFL will have to continue to grow their audience and markets too have success in today's fast paced social media climate. There are no guarantees but with Monumental leading the show and Boe at commissioner, excitement is at its highest in a long time.
“The most important thing for us is we want to expand in a way that is sustainable. It’s a lot of work to launch teams and we want to do it the right way. I think that we will be looking over the coming years to expand by about two to four teams a year, depending on a lot of other factors. I don’t know that we can expand to much faster than that because like I said it’s a lot of work and we want to make sure we do a top notch job so that’s how we look at it I think that’s the pace, it may go a little bit faster than that it may go a little bit slower I don’t know, but that’s our target to be launching between two to four teams a year,” Boe said
Harrison Brown is a college student who has been covering Arena Football since he was 12 years old and has been with ArenaFan since 2014. Harrison was a captain of the varsity football team during his senior year of high school and went on to play one season of Division III football in Massachusetts. Harrison has worked for two indoor football teams, in 2018 he was the Director of Player Personnel for the Jersey Flight and in 2016 he was the Color Commentator for the Philadelphia Yellow Jackets. You can follow Harrison on twitter @HarryBrownRusso.
